"... von Gloeden begins with the laws of Antiquity, overloads them, parades them ponderously (with ephebes, shepherds, ivy, palms, olive trees, tunics, columns, steles) but (first distortion) from Antiquityy he mixes the signals, combining Greek flora, Roman statuary, and the "classical nude" of Beaux-Arts academies: with no irony, it appears, he accepts any worn-out legend as a genuine article. And that isn't all: Antiquity paraded thusly (with his love for boys cleary inferred) is then populated with dark bodies. Perhaps he's right: the painter Delacroix declared that antique draping looked good only on Arabs. It hardly matters — the result is a delicious contradiction of all the literary baggage from a Greek version of antiquity peopled with little peasant gigolos' dark bodies (if any are still living, I beg their pardon; it's not an insult) who wear heavy expressions as dark as the luminous blue from corselets of burned insects".